Posts tagged Internet piracy

Good news for authors and creatives out there - if you're prepared to believe its source. According to a BitTorrent user survey reported by Torrent Freak - though so far at least I've been unable to access this via BitTorrent Inc. itself - "BitTorrent users are 170% more likely to have paid for digital music in the past six months and are 8x more likely to have a music streaming account when compared to the average Internet user." And there is no reason to assume that figures for ebooks would look any different - meaning that what is reputedly one...

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the UK House of Commons has just released its latest responses to the Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth commissioned by the current UK government in 2010 from Professor Ian Hargreaves (the so-called Hargreaves Review) and completed in 2011. And among its overwhelmingly negative conclusions, and its recommendations, it recommends "that the maximum penalty for serious online copyright theft be extended to ten years' imprisonment."
According to the latest UK figures available (2011) from the Ministry of Justice, the average custodial sentence for rape "was in excess of eight and a half years,"...

In my last post, I discussed what I've observed to be the three biggest reasons people pirate e-books. Now that we understand the reasons, how do we actually deter piracy of e-books? Let me answer that question for each of the three reasons.
1. I Like To Collect stuff
Here's the bad news: There's not much you can do about this one. Collectors like to collect in quantity. They are unlikely to spend much money, if any, on the books. You can deter piracy by offering free books for download, but that will only solve the problem for people who are willing...

Piracy is an endlessly debated topic. Views on it range from "don't worry about it too much" to "it has a huge impact on sales." What is often ignored are the reasons why people pirate and, from there, what publishers could do about it.
I've hung out in forums with e-book pirates. I've read about the subject, and I think I can distill my observations down to three main reasons why people pirate (or why they justify it to themselves). In this article, I'll examine them. In my next article, I'll discuss how understanding the reasons can lead to practical ways to reduce...